Welcome to Child Eye Care Charitable Trust [CECCT]

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October 9th 2010 - World Sight Day 2010 - Eyes on the Future - fighting vision impairment in later life.

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Our Vision

To develop a comprehensive eye care program with community development interventions in urban slums and rural areas to improve the quality of life and give the gift of sight to all.

Our Mission

To promote eye health and control avoidable blindness in the entire community through comprehensive health care which will lead to community development and a self reliant sustainable program.

Our Goal

To control and prevent avoidable blindness and to provide treatment and rehabilitation facilities to those who have lost vision and give the gift of sight to all children and adults.

Who We Are ?

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India Was The First Country To Initiate A “National Prophylaxis Program Against Blindness Due To Vitamin A Deficiency” In 1970. But even after a decade of implementation, the scenario remained grim and in 1981 it was estimated that 40000 children in India were losing their eyesight every year and 78000 were becoming partially blind, due to Vitamin A deficiency. The problem was more acute in the remote rural and tribal areas and urban slums.

	Operation Eye Sight Universal
•	A Pilot project to prevent childhood blindness was implemented by Child Eye Care Charitable Trust in slums of Dharavi

	Approach
•	The need for a comprehensive eye care model in which eye care was an important and integrated component of primary health care was understood from the failures of various vertical programs functional in those days. Our approach for implementation was to develop the program with community participation along with an inter sectoral coordination between health, nutrition, education, socio-economic development and environmental sanitation so as to bring about effective utilization of existing health and health related infrastructure, leading to the development of a permanent referral system and a sustainable, self reliant program.

	Outcome
•	The Outcome of this program was the control of avoidable blindness, decline in the malnutrition and mortality levels in children and women, improvement in general health, empowerment of women and a healthier change in the lifestyle of the community.

	Lessons learnt
•	The comprehensive eye care model helped us in controlling avoidable blindness and brought about networking and collaboration between the existing health and health related infrastructure making it a self reliant and sustainable program.
•	From 1982 onwards we have utilized this doctrine and successfully replicated the model of “Comprehensive eye care with community development program” in the slums of Mumbai and tribal villages of Dang.

	Way forward
•	Even today it is estimated that 75% blindness is avoidable and can be prevented if timely eye care is provided to those who need it the most. The solution to this challenge is for medical institutions and ophthalmic hospitals to develop an outreach program with Comprehensive Eye Care with Community Development component.
•	This program can also be developed by non-governmental organizations working in the field of health. The program should always aim at making the community self reliant at the end of a span of 3-5 years, enabling them to utilize the existing health care infrastructure and resources.